Photo: RubensteinI’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
BT asked:
“Yogi Berra has been quoted as having said, ‘I never said most of the things I said.’ Is this correct? How many of the famous quotations associated with him been incorrectly attributed to him?”
The Yale Book of Quotations researched all of Berra’s famous sayings and found that some of them were undoubtedly apocryphal. Berra is a “quotation magnet” like Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw; foolish-sounding quotes tend to be attributed to him regardless of whether he really said them. For example, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” is often erroneously attributed to Berra, but John McNulty used it in a story in the New Yorker, Feb. 10, 1943, when Berra was not yet even in the major leagues. An even earlier version, attributed to a “flutterbrained cutie named Suzanne Ridgeway,” appeared in the Helena Independent, Sept. 10, 1941 (“Now I know why nobody ever comes here; it’s too crowded”).
Maybe some of our newspaper database / Google Books jockeys can uncover still earlier usage.
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I’d like to know the origin of the statement, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.” I’ve seen a version of it attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but it would be fun to know if he’s the origin, or if he quoted someone else.
Here are three quotes I can think of with multiple or uncertain attributions:
1. “If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head.” OR
“If my son is not a liberal when he is twenty, I will disown him; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, I will disown him then.”
and other variants, I am sure.
2. ” When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand being around him; when I was twenty-one, I was amazed how much he had learned in the intervening seven years” This has been usually attributed to Mark Twain, but this attribution has been doubted.
3. “The [Some group] or [some person] never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
This has been attributed to Abba Eban about the Arabs, but I have heard of other attributions and other references.
I heard this as a Russian saying, with the classifications being “Not a communist” and “still a communist”
But did Yogi say ‘I never said most of the things I said’ or not?
http://www.amazon.com/Yogi-Book-Really-Didnt-Everything/dp/0761110909
Say it? He titled his book it!
“The best swordsman does not fear the second best, he fears the worst since there’s no telling what that idiot is going to do.”
I’ve wondered for a long time where teh expression “dead to rights” comes from. Was it used originally in a literary sense, or is it derived from slang? Either way, I think it is fairly commonly used, but not widely understood.
My favorite expression is “In no time, there’s no time.” I’ve tried many times to track its origin, without success.